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Discourse Communities Explained
What is a Discourse Community? John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals." James Porter calls discourse communities: “a local and temporary constraining system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on.” Will Ogles says "Discourse communities are a group of likeminded people who get together and do stuff and its a simple as that." What makes a Discourse Community? A Discourse Community: #has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. #has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. #uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. #utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. #in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis #has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Examples of a Discourse Community Professional Discourse Communities: Medicine or law, literary scholarship or the social sciences -- even auto mechanics or farmers -- are all examples of professional discourse commmunites. Members of each of these communites share certain sets of professional interests, certain sets of professional goals, shared practices, and a shared vocabulary for talking about those intersts, goals, and practices. Doctors, for example: *have the same goals of helping patients *communiciate with other doctors at confernces, write prescriptions to let other qualified people know what they expect done *definitely has their own set of vocabulary- from the Medulla Oblongata to acetaminophen, doctors could have a conversation in front of you that sounded likea foreign language *there also very much is a level of expertise difference among doctors. Fresh out of school doctors will have a lot to learn compared to a chief doctor of a hospital Non-professional Discourse Communities: Different types of fandom represents non-professional discourse communities. Sports fans, movie nuts, comic geeks, music afficionados, wine lovers, crocheters -- each of these different kinds of "fandom" has their own practices and interests and vocabularies and definitions of expertise that would be foreign to those outside the relevant community. Perhaps the most notable example of a non-professional discourse community might be a church (although many churches do have professional clergy, who would then form a professionalized discourse community within the larger community, and whose practices and interests and vocabularies might set them apart from the "layperson" within a given community). *While the goals of any given church group could be different (depending on the denomination or religion), the goals of churches, in general, tend to be similar: to become closer to some higher being, and to so so as a member of a community, or set of peers *They would do this through conversations or bible studies, perhaps during the week, and especially in a shared space (the church building) on Holy Days (Sundays for christians, Saturdays for Jews, Fridays for Muslims, etc.). *Each church has its own vocabulary, which might consist of catechisms, theological virtues, etc. *Here, too, there are levels of exerptise: a new convert would be differentiated form a long-time member of the church by the different levels of familiarity with doctrine, with speech codes, with practices, etc. There woudl also be a difference between an average member and a theologian, or someone who has had professional training or other schooling (such as a priest or a pastor) and thus has a more scholarly, or expert, knowledge of history, theology, and doctrine than even long-time members of the church might. Breaking it down more.. The term "discourse community" is an academic or scholarly term which may make this concept much harder to understand than it needs to be. Discourse communities are simply groups with shared interests sing a shared vocabulary to talk abotu those interests (so, in a way, you could say just reading this wiki entry makes you part of a discourse community!). If you have a question iabout whether or not you're dealing with a discourse community, then, just follow the steps above: if you can fill out the explanations, you're dealing with a discourse community! The concept of the "discourse community," then, is very similar to what Alasdair MacIntyre called a "practice" in his work, After Virtue, ''and to what Michael Warner referred to as "publics" in his work ''Publics and Counter-Publics. 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